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I guess this is the part of the story where I should say, ‘I smile at the memories, and I live my life for love. I do it for her’... but this is not how it will go.
Why did Ellie’s memories somehow seem more real to me than my present reality? The past was entrenched in my heart, soul, and mind. It was in my every breath. It was there in every heartbeat. It was entrenched in every fibre of my being.
I had a lot to be grateful for in my life, but sometimes, some things, some moments, and some people leave such a mark on your life, that life is defined by the moment before, and the moment after their arrival.
I was stuck in that eternal prison, and couldn’t seem to get out of it. On the anniversary of Ellie’s death, many years later, I got the same tattoo as hers, in her memory. The image of the heart of thorns and roses, and the infinity symbol, had haunted my dreams in the years since Ellie’s death.
What it meant to me, I couldn’t say. I just knew what it meant to Ellie. At least, I could say that it will link me back to that happy moment when all was well.
I returned from the tattoo parlor, feeling the dull throbbing in my arm. I took a painkiller and got ready to fall asleep. I looked at the tattoo as I drifted off to sleep, wondering if it will still haunt my dreams tonight.
Silence and darkness. I did not have a single dream, nightmare or vision.
Perhaps, finally, I had been cured.
As I woke, I heard a familiar sound calling my name.
“Cassie! Cassie! Come see my tattoo!”
It was Ellie! My mind jolts, and I wondered if I was too quick to think my nightmares had gone away.
“... Ellie?”
“Yes, Cassie... who else would it be”
I rubbed my eyes to see Ellie still standing there, beaming at me. She brought forward her arm for me to see the identical tattoo, as the one I got, peering at me. I looked at my arm, and mine was still there. If this was not a dream, it felt too real.
“Ellie...you are alive?”
“Yes, Cassie, I feel so alive!”
“No, I mean that you are breathing..”
“I know right! I should have gotten this tattoo ages ago. I finally feel like I am in my skin, and this is what was missing.”
“But you were dead, Ellie?”
Ellie looked at me, puzzled. “Did you have a nightmare, Cassie? You don’t look so good. No worries, I am here, and brought you some world famous croissants that will cheer you up, and cure all.”
She rushed to set up a table, and I can’t stop staring at her alive again. So what happened? I remembered getting the tattoo and thinking Ellie was dead...but nothing else seemed as clear anymore... perhaps it was really a nightmare.
“Ellie, I thought I lost you forever.”
“Whoa there Cassie, have you been going through my movie scripts, and rehearsing my lines? Leave the melodramatic parts to me, ok?”
I still didn’t understand what was going on. The only thing that confirmed what I knew to be true, was the tattoo on my arm. Other than that, the life that I woke up to, was the life was in my past. I tried to explain this to Ellie.
“So, you are trying to tell me I died, and that you never got over the grief, despite finding John... and me haunting you in your dreams, telling you incessantly and repeatedly to just let me go, and move on?”
“Pretty much... yeah.”
“That is a little crazy, Cassie.”
“But it is true. Look at my tattoo!”
“I see nothing Cassie..”
“It’s right there, how can you not see it?!”
“Maybe you have not been eating enough and had a nightmare? You shouldn’t worry, Cassie. I am here, nothing happened to me.”
“But you died of drug overdose. If the present now is real, I can’t lose you again!”
“Cassie, you know I never took drugs in my life. Remember the campaign I started in High School? The one that said: ‘I don’t take candies from strangers’.”
I remembered, and I believed that she was telling the truth. Perhaps life gave both of us a do-over. I could not bear the guilt of not being there for her during her drug addiction.
Perhaps this Cassie was different from the one I knew.
——
Things were the same with Cassie, but in some ways, it wasn’t. This Cassie didn’t do drugs. I puzzled over the pieces from the past life, and the current. It was like there were different jigsaw puzzles, but all of them completed the same final picture.
I made some same old memories with Cassie, going over conversations that I had gone over before... but once in a while, I would make a new memory with her.
“Let us search for John!”
“What do you mean?”
“Let us search for him on social media. I can tip my fans, and they can do the sleuthing for us! I have the best fans...”
Strange. This is not how I met John in -what I call now- my other reality. I look at her puzzled, which Ellie, being Ellie, took as a sign of confirmation. Her devoted fans found John within a week, and Ellie set us up with a meeting, the three of us. It is what I had dreamed when she had passed away, before I had reunited with John, in my other reality.
Now, we all got to be together again.
John met me, and we fell in love again. Ellie was ecstatic and already dreamed up a wedding for the two of us. Years past, and the moment finally arrived, when the two of us married. Ellie was thrilled to be my maid -of-honor and wanted to be the wedding planner too.
I saw her as she prattled away at her dream wedding plan for John and I. It was so good to see her happy, and in my life again. Many times, I felt the other reality was just a mirage... that is until I saw my arm, and the tattoo inked there permanently.
Ellie has settled on a destination wedding for us. I agreed with whatever John and Ellie decided to do. Since she would shoot for a pivotal scene for a movie around the same period, she planned to arrive on a flight earlier than us.
She would take over the wedding arrangement before our wedding day, and leave the next morning, soon after the ceremony. I sighed, relieved at my change of fate, and as I did many times, glanced over my forearm. I saw that this time the tattoo, along with the nightmares of the past, had also disappeared.
What I took to be a sign of good fortune, the disappearance of the tattoo, would however stand to mean something else entirely. Days before my wedding, as Ellie was set to arrive at our wedding destination before us, her plane crashed into the ocean.
187 passengers were onboard at that plane, including Ellie. There were no survivors.
No. This couldn’t be happening again.
My new life turned to a new nightmare. My life became dark, just like before, but this time with new regrets that I didn’t have before, or could have imagined. Ellie never got to be in our wedding in this life.
She reunited John and I, unlike in the other reality, where we were reunited after her death, but cruelly she was gone again, before we said our I dos.
Was I destined to this grief? Years past again, as I grieved her death and like before, the past haunts my dream again.
What did it mean, seeing those dreams again from a lifetime ago?